Skills Bank
Banque de ressources

Individual Profiles

by Serna Aksoy

Leiba Aronoff is one of our founding members who just completed a successful year as CCLOW president. She spent the years preceding her presidency chairing the Skills Bank Committee.

Leila's involvement with the women's movement dates back to late sixties when she found inspiration in Betty Freidan's Feminine Mystique and went back to school to do graduate work in social work at McGill University. While working part-time on her master's degree, she mothered three children, as well as becoming involved with the McGill women's Alumni for which she advocated various projects. Now, she is helping to organize the 100th Anniversary Celebration Conference of women's admittance to the university.

Leiba stresses that it is her involvement with the women's movement which gives her inspiration to try out new ideas and models in her work as a coordinator of Staff Development at Ville Marie Social Services. She adds that she uses her CCLOW network for expert consulting and draws most of her resources from her connections within the women's movement. She emphasizes that "my CCLOW connections come with me when I go to work".

Leiba points out that most of the community development models which she uses in social services are already tried and tested by women's groups and programs and are put to use under severe budget constraints. Consequently they can be used as examples to learn from.

Leiba Aronoff is part of Ville Marie history. While being employed as a Coordinator of Volunteer workers at the Children's Services Centre, she created her own job as the Coordinator of Staff Development. When the Quebec Government amalgamated the Social Service institution into larger centres she became the coordinator of Staff Development of a centre which employs approximately 400 staff members.

In this capacity she administers, negotiates, mediates, hires, contracts, designs, adapts and applies programs, assesses needs and sets priorities. However, she does not teach any of the programs she designs.

Leiba subscribes to the community development and community education model of adult education when doing staff development. She uses this model within her agency and finds that it works miraculously, especially under budget constraints and pressures for efficient, effective, creative programs.

Remembering that staff development aims at organizational change and has impact an staff as well as the organization, she offers two examples from the projects she has undertaken within the recent years which illustrate her philosophy on effective change through the education of the organizational community.

The first example she gives is the processing of the Ontario Ministry Social Services Youth Protection Training Program for use within the Ville Marie System. Mindful of the budget constraints, Leiba designed a program where only a small number of staff would go to Ontario for training and bring the expertise home and train the rest of the staff working with youth protection, through self-directed learning and peer learning models. Leiba informs me that this program has been very successful: they have been able to train 165 staff members over a two-year period and they are still training newcomers.

Her other project, which utilized the Toronto based Sexual Abuse Training Program, got started in a similar fashion. The Ville Marie Centre brought in a Task Force from Ontario and later on used peer learning techniques to train animators and consultants to work with the difficult incest-related cases.

Leiba's budget constraints were real and required a compressive planning model which stayed within financial limits and reached as many people as possible. Through the peer learning model she accomplished this goal.

There were also unintended but pleasant and productive side effects of these two programs. Leiba discovered that the success of the staff training and development at Ville Marie reached the other agencies in the greater Montreal community, and a cooperation and collaboration between French and the only other English speaking agency with the Ville Marie Social Service became a reality. This contact is furthered and enhanced by bilingual Ville Marie staff exchanging expertise and resources with the French speaking agencies.

Having reviewed Leiba's successful track record I would like to inform our readers that Leiba would be pleased to share with you her expertise on how to process a training program within a social service agency, as well as her other skills. Please make your requests by using the blue Skills Bank Requester guideline and forward it to the Skills Bank coordinator, CCLOW, 692 Coxwell Avenue, Toronto, Ontario.